MAB is a Rich Web Application to search products on all 6
Amazon-branded sites (com, ca, co.uk, fr, co.jp), showing results in a
handy interface, typical of desktop programs. MAB lets you search
within one window without distracting you with plenty of images and
texts not concerning what you are effectively looking for.

Correlates.com is a comprehensive shopping site that allows you to locate any two Amazon products and compare them side by side in the same window.

That way you don't have to keep switching between windows to see how the details of one product compare with the details of another. The last 25 items you looked at are saved, and you can switch between items in a jiffy.

Hundreds of software and information industry
executives honored their peers at the 20th annual SIIA Codie Awards
banquet at Universal Studios’ Globe Theatre. In its first appearance at
the event, Amazon Web Services took home the award for "Best Web
Services Solution", which AWS evangelist Jeff Barr proudly accepted on
behalf of the team. This year more than 800 companies submitted a
record 1,000 nominations for the awards. Visit the SIAA site for the complete list of winners and a press release about the event.

IBM DeveloperWorks has published a new article: XML Matters: Beyond the DOM. Written by Dethe Elza, the article covers advanced DOM functions such as insertAfter and prependChild, a technique for making the Internet Explorer DOM a bit more consistent with the DOM standard, some shortcut functions, and advanced traversal of the DOM tree.

The new TicTap service lets you search the Amazon product catalog using an SMS (text) message. To get started with TicTap, simply send an ISBN number, a UPC code, or even some keywords to 763-807-3927 and wait for the reply. TicTap performs an ECS search and returns the results to you as a text message.

The returned message includes the Product name, the Amazon price, the list price, the review count, and even the Amazon 'star' rating.

The screen shot at right shows a sample message as returned by TicTap.

StrikeIron has released the OnDemand Web Services for Microsoft Excel. Using this product it is easy to add web services calls to any Excel spreadsheet using simple point and click operations. You can download and try the product for free, and you can see the product in action by watching the screencast.

To continue to provide high-quality, reliable and
secure web services, ECS will enforce a stricter Developer Token
validation policy. Please check that you are passing in a valid
Developer Token with your request. If you are using an invalid
Developer Token, you will need to replace it with a valid Subscription
ID. For help, visit the Developer Token Validation FAQ.

Many people find WSDL (and the new WSDL 2) to be hard to create, and hard to use, even with tools and other high-level support.

Tim Bray of Sun has been talking about Replacing WSDL. Candidates include Norm Walsh's NSDL and Tim's own SMEX-D. It is premature to talk about any Amazon support for these WSDL alternatives, but we are watching these discussions with interest. It would be very interesting to get the developer perspective on all of this; feel free to post your comments to this blog.